Page 20 - Pep Guardiola: Another Way of Winning: The Biography

when he realises what the next game will be like or discovers how it can be won; that moment that
‘gives sense to his profession’, as he puts it.
Despite having twenty-four assistants, he worked longer hours than most of them and although the
club offered him a unit of experts who could analyse games, he could never bring himself to surrender

control of that part of the job. ‘For me, the most wonderful thing is planning what is going to happen
in each game,’ Guardiola has explained. ‘Which players I have at my disposal, which tools I can use,
what the opposition is like ... I want to imagine what will happen. I always try and give the players
the security of knowing what they’ll encounter. This increases the possibility of doing things well.’
Moving from task to task, from deadline to deadline, is when he feels most alive, totally immersed
or dashing between several projects, addicted to the adrenalin rush generated by it. And that way of
understanding his profession fulfils and yet consumes him, but it is the only one possible for him and

the one pledged to the fans:‘I promise you that we’ll work hard. I don’t know if we’ll win, but we
will try very hard. Fasten your seat belts, you are going to enjoy the ride’ is what he told them at the
presentation of the team in summer 2008.
That work ethic, instilled in him by his parents, is very much part of the Catalan character: saving
the soul through industry, effort, honest labour and giving your all to the job. In a suitably symbolic
place (the Catalan Parliament), and on being awarded the Nation’s Gold Medal, the country’s highest

accolade for a Catalan citizen, in recognition for his representation of Catalan sporting values, he
said in his acceptance speech: ‘If we get up early, very early, and think about it, believe me, we are
an unstoppable country.’
But at the same time Pep sets impossibly high standards and is beset by a sense of never being
quite good enough. Guardiola might look strong and capable of carrying a club and a nation on his
shoulders but he is very sensitive about the reaction of the team and about disappointing the fans by
not meeting their expectations. Or his own.

He once confided to a close friend: ‘I can imagine the most amazing solution to a problem and then
sometimes players come out with something better during the game that I hadn’t thought of. Then that
for me it is like a little defeat, it means I should have found that solution earlier.’
The club, the director of football and the coach try to reduce the element of surprise, of
unpredictability, in a game through training and analysing the opposition. Before a game, the manager
wants to know which approach to take, but in the end it comes down to the player, it can’t be directed

and, what’s more, there are infinite variables on the pitch. How else can Iniesta’s goal at Stamford
Bridge in 2009 be explained, when Barcelona seemed to have lost the game? For Pep, that is the
wonder of football. And the frustration, too: trying to make something so unpredictable, predictable.
No matter how hard he works, he is fighting a losing battle.
‘Guardiola loves football,’ his friend the film director David Trueba wrote. ‘And he loves
winning, because that is what the game is about – but particularly by doing justice to the approach. He
proposes a system and he only asks for you to trust him, that you are faithful to him. The day he

notices players who are uncommitted, apathetic, doubtful, even after an irrelevant training session, he
is a sad man, demoralised, willing to leave everything.
‘No one should be confused about this,’ Trueba continues. ‘He is an obsessive professional, who
pays attention to detail, knowing that details can decide a game. He reveres the club he works for and
has imposed a rule not to be more than a mere piece in the structure, to earn his salary and never ask
for as much as a coffee without paying for it. He doesn’t aspire to be recognised as an indoctrinator, a

guru or a guide. He just wants to be recognised as a coach: a good coach. The other things, the good
and the bad, are burdens put on him by a society in need of role models. Perhaps everybody is tired of